Steps (total ≤20min labour)

Mix all but flour (water, salt, sugar, and dry yeast) together in a big bowl

Put flour and mix.

It may be tough at first. Leave some time and try again; it should be easier

Put a cover and leave like for 8 hours

I usually do above steps at night, and do below at the next morning

Form it

Sprinkle enough flour both to the top of the bowl and the plate to bake, otherwise you will have hard time removing the baked bread out later.

Preheat oven to 470F

It’s pretty hot!

I preheat after forming the dough, so that dough have enough time to rest.

Sprinkle water and make some coupe

I usually use scissors to cut

Water is to make the dough moisture. Don’t put too much to make them wet

Insert into oven, reduce the heat to 450F, and wait for 25min

Don’t undercook or overcook

If you can see some edges have tiny black line, that’s the time

Undercooked baguettes make it hard to slice and eat, particularly the skin. This may sound opposite, but that was true for me.

Take the bread out, and leave for 30min to cool down

It’s still cooking inside

It’s also extremely hard to slice when it’s too moisture

Slice

Use breadknife. Don’t press. Google how to slice bread

Notes

Baking breads, particularly baguettes, needs the oven to be somewhat moisture. Also the oven needs to be hot even after opening the door to put the doughs in. One solution is to put stones and small bowl with water in advance. But I think that they don’t have to be pure objects that achieve the breads’ requirements, but they can be something that give us additional benefit. Last time I put chicken thighs with some herbs. Since I put chicken in advance, they should have kept high temperature when I re-open the door to put doughs in, and also chicken should have generated some vapour that moisturize the oven room. The baguettes I got were good, and also I got the chicken to be roasted for free.

Buy a big bag of yeast, and keep it in freezer. If it’s inconvenient for you to use, take some batch out into an empty jar or anything.

They taste amazing. Considering the fact that it’s easy for me to make and it costs very low, I think this is really practical recipe that I can keep doing.

I keep the brown baked sprinkled flour into ziploc. They can be used for making white sauce with butter.

I form dough directly on the plate to bake. One less object to clean.

I’m calling this recipe as my bread making version 2. I have published version 1 article in Japanese in the past, but this current version is better and easier.

Currently experimenting making version 3 which won’t use dry yeast but uses sourdough starter.